Wildlife Art

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Wildlife Photography – Improving Your Animal Instincts!

The exposure of a digital photograph is affected by the camera’s aperture, shutter speed, sensor ISO rating, and of course the amount of light in the scene being photographed. An incorrect exposure will turn an otherwise well composed wildlife image into something mediocre and at worst completely ruin a shot.All digital cameras have an automatic exposure setting, so it may seem that exposure is something that is best left up to the camera. It’s certainly true that in some situations your camera’s automatic exposure system will produce properly exposed shots, but there are also many situations where it will not.Automatic exposure systems only tend to work well when a scene and the subject animal consist mainly of mid-tones. This is because automatic exposure averages out the exposure of the scene as a whole, achieving an overall exposure equivalent to if the scene was a uniform mid-tone grey. Furthermore, pale animals against dark backgrounds may be overexposed and dark animals against pale backgrounds may be underexposed. * Spot Metering – in this mode the camera bases its exposure value on a single point in the image (usually the centre of the image, but this point can be adjusted on most cameras). This is a useful mode for wildlife photography as it often can enable you to achieve the correct exposure for the subject animal. As centre-weighted metering still uses as form of averaging it can still however produce incorrect exposure if the centre of the image contains extremes of light or dark.If you find your camera’s metering doesn’t produce good results for a given scene (e.g. when your subject animal is very light of dark) you can use the manual EV Compensation (Exposure Value Compensation) setting on your camera to adjust the exposure it will use. A far more reliable way of assessing exposure is to look at your camera’s histogram. Underexposed images can be corrected easily in tools like Photoshop, but if an image is significantly underexposed the corrected image will have an undesirable grainy texture called ‘noise’.